I can't save my animation as a .mov and thats the only thing that plays on my mac
The MP4 (.mp4) container format is derived from the the Quicktime MOV, and also widely supported on Apple products. A MP4 file containing H.264 video and, optionally AAC audio, will play on all Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and many older PowerPC Macs as well. Simply configure your output settings as shown:

It is important to understand that MP4, MOV, Matroska, AVI and others are CONTAINER formats, not video formats. A video file as we commonly deal with it today is a wrapper around 1 or more video streams(in formats such as H.264, VC-1, DNxHD, and ProRes, and so on), and may include audio and subtitle data as well. Whether you can play a file or not requires your software to both be able to understand the container format, and the video compression format of the video stream within. So referring to things such as a &quot;.mov video&quot; or a &quot;h264 video&quot; is not enough information to troubleshoot playback and encoding issues.
Additionally, it's important to distinguish video compression formats (like h.264) from software libraries that create them (such as x264, a popular open source h.264 encoder)